Articles

Imagine a designer’s alchemical magic is that of a hostess-with-the-mostest giving the Greatest Cocktail Party Ev-ah. She sets the stage, she draws you out, she makes you feel your wittiest and prettiest.

New Jersey native Robert Siegel has to laugh whenever a new acquaintance asks him the classic Los Angeles question: Did you move here for a Hollywood career? “I have to tell them, ‘No, I’m not an actor. I’m a potter,’” he...

From the still waters of Mandalay Bay, a secluded spot off the storied Aegean Sea—stomping grounds for the ancient Greeks, Romans and their notoriously unpredictable gods—Amanruya resembles a small village. Nestled hillside amid olive and...

Jane Buckingham is paid to know where hemlines are currently hitting, where they hit last year and where they’re going to land next season; she’s intimately acquainted with what kind of microbrews the 35-to-44 demographic...

When interior designer Taylor Borsari got a call from longtime clients to completely gut their 4,000-square-foot, coast-hugging Laguna Beach house, she quickly realized she wouldn’t be able to tackle the project on her own.

When it comes to J. Craig Venter, among the world’s most boldface scientific names, a simple motto may be the most apt: Work hard, play hard. The proof? Venter’s striking contemporary home in La Jolla, which serves as everything from an...

When Aleka Kim opened a pop-up shop in her Bulthaup showroom in San Diego’s East Village, she hoped a rotating selection of eye candy would catch the attention of passersby. “I wanted to connect with my neighbors,” says Kim, who...

Even today you’d be hard-pressed to find a starchitect-branded glass structure in Florence, one of the few cities in the world with a skyline still relatively untouched by modernization (although rumor has it that Sir Norman Foster...

Raised in San Miguel de Allende by parents she describes as “expat artist hippies,” Rachel Horn did her best to rebel. But nature seems to have won out: After completing an undergrad thesis at Scripps College on...

In the business of design, woe is the designer who neglects the design of the business. Such is not the case with Susan Hornbeak-Ortiz, principal and co-founder of the six-year-old firm Shine by S.H.O., who has found that creativity,...